Naming

Naming is eighty percent elimination. You generate a hundred to three hundred candidates and then cut: anything hard to pronounce, anything that sounds foolish in German or English, anything whose domain is taken and anything colliding with a registered trademark in the class you trade in. Out of three hundred names, five reach the end and one survives. Expect two to four weeks, with most of the time going into research rather than invention.

Why companies underrate it: the owner invents a name over a weekend, commissions a logo and a year later gets a letter from another company's lawyers. Redoing the logo, the packaging, the website and the vehicle livery costs many times more than the research would have. The cheapest step in the whole branding process is half a day in a trademark database, while the name is still just a word in a spreadsheet.

How it runs: first you agree what the name has to do. Should it explain what you sell, or be an empty vessel you fill with meaning over time? Then candidates arrive in categories: descriptive, compound, invented, and borrowed from older languages. You supply the markets you are heading for and rule out names that competitors make unusable. At the end there is one simple test: say the name down a phone line and have the other side write it down.

An honest limit: a good name sells nothing on its own. The names that work in Slovakia work because the same service stood behind them for years, not because they were brilliant on day one. So it is not worth delaying a launch by six months hunting for the perfect word. A name that is not bad, is free to use and can be said out loud is enough.

We write every candidate straight into the sentence someone will use to introduce themselves on a call. Half the names that look good on paper die in that sentence. Try it today: say your working name out loud, then spell it the way you would dictate it to a foreigner.